counting down
by shineyma
Summary: Whoever his soulmate is, he's been holding on to her since his timer clicked on six years ago. Everything he's been through—with his family, with Garrett, alone in that fucking forest—he's had her with him, carrying the promise of future happiness right there on his wrist. [Part one of the "before you fall" series]


A/N: Two things to note here: 1) I've never seen the movie that the soulmate timer concept is apparently based upon, so apologies if I got anything wrong. I just sort of took what I remembered from various fics and then made up the rest.

2) I'm almost definitely messing up Ward's background here, because I only watched the flashbacks once, and it was a while ago. Apologies if anyone is offended by any inaccuracies.

Also, this is the first fic I've posted in quite a while, so please be gentle if you review!

* * *

Grant doesn't remember being told about soulmates. It feels like something he's always known, like he was born with the knowledge that somewhere in the world was his other half. It feels like instinctual knowledge, that there's someone who is meant for him and he's likewise meant for them. That someone, somewhere will love him wholeheartedly and unreservedly.

Of course, he realizes as he gets older, that's not necessarily true. His parents are soulmates, and there's nothing wholehearted or perfect about their love—if it can even be called that. His father is cruel to his mother, horribly so, and he watches the way she cowers from him and feels sick. Maynard, his older brother, picks up on their father's habits, and without a soulmate to torment, he turns to Grant and their little brother, Ashton.

After that horrible day at the well, the day he learns hate, he promises himself he will never be like Maynard or their father. Ashton has nothing to fear from him, and neither does his soulmate. When he finds her (_if he finds her_, a nasty little voice in his head whispers), he'll protect her. He will never, ever hurt his soulmate. No one will. He'll make sure of it.

x

When he's ten years old, his mother takes him to get his timer. It's a painless process, if only because he's unconscious for it. When he wakes up, he's disappointed to find that his timer is blank. He knows this means his soulmate doesn't have hers yet, and he hopes that it's because she's too young, and not that she lives in one of the parts of the world where timers aren't used.

It's a good day, the day he gets his timer. Just he and his mother, out in Boston together, and she takes him to get ice cream to celebrate. She tells him not to tell his father, and he promises he won't. He also promises her he's going to be a good soulmate, the very best.

"Of course you will, Grant," she agrees. She smiles a little, but it's sad, and in his later years he'll wonder what promises his father made to her, to put that look on her face. In the moment, though, he's just happy. He's one step closer to finding his soulmate.

x

He's fourteen when his timer clicks on. It's early September, and he's in the middle of helping Ashton with his math homework when he hears a beep and looks down to see that his timer has started counting. The two of them stare at it for a few seconds, and then Ashton lets out a whoop and hugs him.

"Congratulations, man!" Ashton says when he lets go. "Freaking finally, I thought that thing was gonna be blank forever!"

Easy for him to say. His timer had started counting down the moment he got it.

"Yeah, yeah," Grant says, shoving Ashton back into his chair. "Get back to work. Those fractions aren't gonna multiply themselves."

Still, as his little brother rolls his eyes and picks up his pencil, Grant can't help but stare down at his timer. Sixteen years. He'll be thirty when he meets his soulmate, and _that_ feels like it's forever away, but still. He's gonna meet his soulmate, and Ashton will meet _his_, and someday they're both gonna be far away from here with women who love them. And he likes to think he's done a good enough job shielding Ashton from Maynard and their father that Ashton will be good to his soulmate, good like Grant plans to be.

Even knowing how long a wait he's got, right now it feels impossible to be anything but happy.

x

He goes to military school, and he's not happy. Then he's in juvie, and he's not happy. Then he's alone in the wilderness, and he's a little bit happier, but still mostly miserable. Through it all, there's his timer, right there on his wrist, like he's bringing his soulmate with him wherever he goes. Sometimes he just sits and watches it, watches the seconds ticking away like if he stares hard enough the years will do the same. He'll be thirty when he meets his soulmate, and sitting there at seventeen, in those woods with no one but a dog for company, thirty seems unbearably far away.

Still though, it's a comfort. He presses his fingers to the timer and imagines that he feels a little warmth there, like his soulmate is doing the same thing, wherever she is. Maybe she's as desperate to meet him as he is to meet her.

He hopes not. He hopes she's happy. He hope she has a wonderful, loving family who have never made her feel anything less than cherished. He hopes that everything in her life is perfect, and that she looks forward to meeting him the way the girls at his (non-military) school had looked forward to meeting their soulmates: with dreams of marriage and children and happily ever after. He hopes that she never has cause to desperately cling to the idea of him, the way he's been desperately clinging to the idea of her.

It might be nice for his other half to be as broken and hopeless as he is, because how else could she understand him and the way he is, but…he'd rather she weren't. He'd much rather she not understand him at all.

x

He's nearly twenty when Garrett comes back and tells him about HYDRA. HYDRA's only a vaguely familiar name, something he's read in history books, but SHIELD—well, that's familiar. Everyone knows about SHIELD, in the way that no one knows anything; no one knows what SHIELD does, really, aside from provide 'planetary protection'—or American protection, maybe? No one seems to be sure. Being told that he has to join SHIELD to join HYDRA doesn't bother him. The whole reason Garrett broke him out of juvie in the first place was for the skills he displayed at military school, so it's not a surprise that he's expect to join up to some military-type organization. What is surprising (and, honestly, terrifying) is what that joining up requires.

"You'll have to lose the timer," Garrett tells him one day during lunch. They're at a diner somewhere in Arkansas, on their way to the nearest SHIELD recruitment office, and the words are so unexpected that he almost drops his fork.

"Sir?" he asks, really hoping he's misheard.

"SHIELD specialists do a lot of undercover work," Garrett says with a significant look. Right, yeah, he'll be undercover doing undercover work. Awesome. "Undercover agents can't have identifying marks, and soulmate timers definitely qualify." He pulls back his right sleeve to display empty skin at his wrist, and Grant barely holds back a cringe.

"But isn't a blank wrist just as noticeable?" Grant asks. He hopes this is another one of Garrett's tests, another instance of Garrett saying something just to see how he'll react.

"SHIELD has fake timers," Garrett says. "They'll slap one on you that's green, red, or counting down, depending on the cover."

Grant really has no idea what to say, and he's pretty sure he won't be able to finish his lunch. He's carried his soulmate with him this far, and to lose his timer…it feels like abandoning her. He feels sick. He feels like he's caught between how much he owes Garrett, for everything the man's done for him, and how much he owes his soulmate, for everything the idea of her has meant.

"Is that gonna be a problem?" Garrett demands. There's very obviously only one right answer, so Grant gives it.

"No, sir," he says.

x

He joins up with SHIELD, goes through the application process and the testing, then the Ops Academy. It's beyond difficult, painful and sometimes intolerable, but his time alone in the wilderness sure gave him a leg up on all of his classmates. He's the top of his class the whole time, and he dedicates himself to staying that way.

He doesn't make friends, not really. Training is exhausting, and wilderness survival might have helped on the physical side of things, but it sure didn't do anything for his people skills. He does his best to get along with everyone, never starts fights but always ends them, and if he ever feels lonely, he contents himself with tracing his fingers along his timer, watching it count down. He'll have to give it up once he graduates, and he has no idea what happens after that. It's enough to make him sick, sometimes, and it's the only time he doubts his commitment to Garrett's cause.

Grant's afraid of what Garrett would do if he knew how much the idea of losing his timer bothers him, so he holds the question in. He waits, through all of his classes and morning drills and tests, and never dares to seek the answer he dearly needs. He holds it in for ages, until after graduation, when the day comes for his timer to be removed, and he's alone in an exam room with a SHIELD technician named Banks.

"What's going to happen to my soulmate's timer?" he asks the woman quietly. He means to sound casual, but he can barely force the words out. "Will it go red?"

She gives him a sympathetic smile, and he figures she must get the question a lot. "No, Agent Ward," she says, "It'll just go blank, like you never had a timer at all."

He looks down at the timer, counting down, still ten years to go. "And when I meet her?"

"You'll know just by looking at her, and even if you don't, her timer will go off," Banks assures him. "You have absolutely nothing to worry about."

"Thank you," he says. He'd like to say he doesn't know why there's a lump in his throat, but he's going to be lying to everyone else so he might as well be honest with himself. Whoever his soulmate is, he's been holding on to her since his timer clicked on six years ago. Everything he's been through—with his family, with Garrett, alone in that fucking forest—he's had her with him, carrying the promise of future happiness right there on his wrist.

"Are you ready?" Banks asks.

"Yeah," he says, and watches as she picks up the needle from the tray next to the bed he's lying on. He needs to be sedated for the removal, just like he was for the installation. The difference is that the installation requires sedation because it's a delicate process that can be messed up if the recipient so much as twitches, and removal requires it because, apparently, it's unimaginably painful. He looks back down at the timer and thinks, as the needle slides into his other arm, that it couldn't possibly be as bad as what he'll feel when he wakes up to an empty wrist.

x

In the next ten years, he experiences a lot of pain. Nothing ever compares to that moment.

x

He goes on mission after mission, travels the world doing SHIELD's work, dirty and otherwise. And it is, for the most part, SHIELD's work. He's a sleeper agent in every sense of the word, and he gets very little in the way of orders from HYDRA.

He travels, and he fights, and he kills people, and he steals things, and he infiltrates terrorist organizations, and every time has one of the fake timers placed on his wrist he feels a little bit sick. He has less time to wonder about his soulmate now. With the timer gone, it doesn't feel like he carries her with him, the way he did before. Sometimes he thinks it's a good thing, because it makes things easier. Thoughts of her aren't as comforting as they used to be.

When he does think of her, he can't help but wonder what she'll think of him. As he gets closer to thirty, it seems more relevant the kind of person he is. He knows he's closed off, often called humorless by the agents he works with—not that he works with other agents often. He does his best work alone, and everyone knows it.

On his bad nights—the nights where he's undercover, playing at being the scum of the earth, pretending to condone certain horrors so he can bring down the people committing them—he worries about whether he'll be able to connect with his soulmate, whether she'll be willing to put up with all of his difficulties communicating. He wonders if she'll be able to accept that he's SHIELD. He wonders if she'll ever know that he's HYDRA, and whether that will bother her. He wonders if she'll mind how much blood he has on his hands.

He's well aware that he's beyond screwed up, so mostly he wonders who on earth could possibly fit with him.

x

The offer to join Coulson's team is exactly the break they've been waiting for. Coulson was somehow brought back from the dead, and no one knows how. There's nothing in any of the files Garrett can access, so their best play is to put an agent close to him and try to manipulate the man into searching for answers himself.

Grant just wishes that the agent could be anyone but him. He's not lying when he tells Coulson he does his best work alone, and his protests against joining the team (although guaranteed to get him on it) are entirely honest. He does _not_ want to be a part of this team, or any team at all, really.

But he has his orders, and he owes Garrett everything, so he'll obey them.

He's told to report to hangar three and ask for Fitzsimmons, and that's exactly what he does. Of course, he knows perfectly well from his research into the team that Fitzsimmons is actually two different people—Jemma Simmons, biochemist, and Leopold Fitz, engineer—but there's no reason for his undercover persona to know that.

In their respective files, it's underlined and bolded that the two are _not_ soulmates, but standing here, watching them, it's hard to believe. They're both talking at a rapid fire pace, and Grant honestly cannot tell whether they're actually talking to each other or just themselves. He can't make heads or tails of it, although they seem to be doing fine.

He predicts that he'll have a constant headache around these two.

He drops his bag to get their attention, asks for Fitzsimmons, and hands over his comm receiver after he's been introduced. He can't help the flinch when Fitz destroys the comm receiver—seriously, Grant's been accused of being rough on his tech, but he got that thing _two days ago_—but he doesn't think the two of them notice.

(Neither one of them passed their field tests—probably the only test they've ever failed in their lives—and he's going to have to protect them as part of his cover. So far, they've demonstrated a stunning lack of situational awareness—he had to _drop his bag_ to get their attention, and he doesn't think they've even noticed how heavily he's armed. There is absolutely no way this can end well.)

Simmons comes over to him, swabs his mouth while saying something about silicone DNA (what?), and then finally makes eye contact with him as she twists the swab back into its little tube.

"It's very…" she trails off, her eyes widening, and he has no guess as to what she was about to say because he feels like he's just been punched in the chest. Except not in a painful way. He's suddenly imbued with warmth, radiating out from his sternum and filling his whole body, soothing away the lingering aches from his fight with Vanchat's men. The annoyance he's been feeling about this assignment, the tension he always carries when starting a new undercover op, the lingering worry over whether this plan will even give them what they need to save Garrett's life—all of it suddenly disappears in the wake of this new warmth. He's never felt anything like it before, but he can venture a guess.

He's thirty years old.

He vaguely hears a strange chiming noise and registers that Fitz is swearing, but it doesn't seem important. His entire world has narrowed to the woman in front of him.

"Hi," she says, a little faintly.

"Hi," he echoes. He feels like he's moving underwater as he reaches out and takes her right arm, still slightly raised, and turns it over to view her wrist. Her timer is green, cheerfully blinking the date and time at him. He's thirty years old, and he's found his soulmate.

She's his _soulmate_. Jemma Simmons—genius prodigy, holder of two PhDs, and someone who has been evaluated at exactly .043% chance of turning to HYDRA—is his soulmate.

Well.

Shit.


End file.
